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Comment by regularfry | Hacker News Reader

I was doing some work on an old 4:3 IBM X41 last weekend. Reminded me what we've lost.

iPad Pro 12.9" provides 4:3 in HiDPI with good battery life, which challenges the claim that laptops couldn't source 4:3 screens.

Also, I would venture a guess - a lot of us are not laptop-gamers and as such, do not look forward to those '>=120Hz' display-panel technologies companies are dedicating so much resources into. A significant part of the reason I'm about to buy an external monitor is the 16:9 ratio vertically challenged little screen on my laptop. This new trend ought to catch on.

>= 120Hz is great for everything, not just games. Moving your mouse (or scrolling) on a 60Hz monitor after you've used something higher is like looking at a slide show.

For example, on a 60Hz monitoring, try panning around a Google Map and reading the labels. They just become a mushy blur. On a higher refresh-rate display, you can read the labels as they move. (I always found this to be an interesting demo: https://testufo.com/persistence)

> >= 120Hz is great for everything

It's not great for battery life.

iPad Pro adjusts dynamically.

In the same way, Flagship SoC is great perf but not great for battery so we can choose to buy middle spec SoC.

Nice website, thanks for linking it. But, it looks like I'm in the minority here - having always worked on 60Hz screen computers and never finding myself wishing for higher refresh rate than a better screen ratio. Perhaps, personally speaking, my priorities are different.

What have we lost?

I have _always_ preferred a wider screen to a taller one because it means I can fit more xterms side-by-side.

Yea, seriously. When did the whole taller windows are for productivity vs wider for media folks, decide this as obvious and undeniable?

It's just a preference!

The most workflow obessesed tiling window manager people tend to expect a two column, (one with a tall window, with a 2 or 3 rows in the other) approach by default. Often 3 columns.

I can see where taller might be better for documents- so maybe better for LaTex, Word, etc. productivity. But not for programming IMHO.

ThinkPad T61 models changed from 1400x1050 (SXGA+) to 1440x900 (WXGA+) when they went widescreen.

They literally just lopped off 150 vertical pixels. There wasn’t some corresponding gain in horizontal space. You could fit the same number of xterms side-by-side on either laptop.

I had one of the lovely T61s models that did 1600x1200. That machine had a long, long lifespan for a 3+g memory it could support. Miss the 4:3

Probably still worth something to the right person!

But it's not one or the other. The screen is just as wide, but taller. So your xterms can be just as wide but you can fit more rows into them.

Stop romanticising the past. :) You are certainly having more characters vertically on screen on current environments plus having more horizontally.

Stop romanticising the present.

Wider (and, crucially: shorter) displays were foisted on us by the majority of computer users being heavy media consumers the desire to consolidate supply chains.

The efficacy of a 16:10 (or 5:2) screen is undeniable.

I’ve been looking for a good 16:10 screen to replace my aging Dell U2412M’s for over 5 years at this point.

The 3840x2400 16:10 on the new XPS 17" is very nice. It was a substantial increase from the older 15" i9 mac I use for work. Well worth the extra $400 for it over the 1900x1200 version for me.

My lamentation at the end was about dedicated displays (off topic in a thread about laptops I know...)

I have a new MacBook coming soon, so 16:10 dreams come true there.

IMO avoiding 16:9 aspect ratio is no longer important on dedicated monitors but still important on laptop monitors.

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